-Caveat Lector- an excerpt from: Interference Dan E. Moldea©1989 William Morrow and Company, Inc. New York, NY ISBN 0-688-08303-X ---[5]-- 6 The Wire Services ANOTHER TEAM IN THE All-American Football Conference was the Cleveland Browns, formed by a crime-syndicate bookmaker, Arthur "Mickey" McBride. At the time he owned the Browns, McBride was the head of the Continental Racing Wire, the mob's gambling news service—which the Special Senate Committee to Investigate Organized Crime in Interstate Commerce, better known as the Kefauver Committee—later described as "Public Enemy Number One."[1] McBride's partner was James M. Ragen, Sr., of Chicago. Born in Chicago in 1888, McBride was selling newspapers on the street at age six and became the circulation manager of William Randolph Hearst's Chicago American in 1911. Two years later, he was sent to Cleveland by Hearst and held the same position for The Cleveland News, an afternoon paper. McBride became the newspaper's point man in its rough-and-tumble circulation wars against The Cleveland Plain Dealer. Ragen was the circulation manager of The Cleveland Leader, the News-owned morning paper. In the midst of the battles, trucks were hijacked and people were beaten, stabbed, and shot. Through these wars, McBride recruited Morris Dalitz and his Cleveland-based Mayfield Road Gang for the rough stuff. McBride remained in the newspaper business until 1930 when he purchased his first taxicab company and parlayed it into the only cab company in the metropolitan Cleveland area.[2] A shrewd businessman with a wide variety of investments in Cleveland, Chicago, and the Miami area, the quiet McBride once said, "Nobody ever got rich on a salary." McBride had founded the Continental Racing Wire in the wake of the collapse of the Nationwide News Service, which had been operated out of Chicago by Moses L. Annenberg, who like McBride and Ragen had started his career as a circulation manager for the Hearst newspaper chain. After Annenberg's August 1939 indictment for criminal tax fraud, he made a deal with the government that provided that similar charges be dropped against his son Walter Annenberg and two of their associates in Nationwide. In return, Annenberg pleaded guilty, paid $9.5 million in back taxes and penalties, and went to prison in 1940.[3] Walter Annenberg closed down Nationwide and took over his father's publishing empire, which included The Philadelphia Inquirer and The Daily Racing Form, which the elder Annenberg had bought in 1922.[4] Among those sent by the Chicago mob to work for the elder Annenberg on his wire service had been Johnny Rosselli. After the collapse of Nationwide, Rosselli went to Hollywood to work for the Motion Picture Producers Association. Within three years, he and six other Chicago mobsters-who had taken over the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees, the largest union in Hollywood-were indicted and convicted for selling labor peace to the major movie studios.[5] While the Mafia was busy shaking down Hollywood, Nationwide's Chicago manager, Tom Kelly, persuaded his brother-in-law, Mickey McBride, to create Continental in November 1939, in the wake of Nationwide's collapse, with a mere $20,000 investment. McBride was also encouraged to do so by James Ragen, who was indicted with Annenberg for his role in the Nationwide scheme and pleaded guilty. The intent of the wire service had been to provide every bookmaker in the country with needed information on all aspects of sports gambling, particularly horse racing. Sports results were transmitted over both the telephone and telegraph to twentyfour large "distributors" throughout the United States. The gambling information was then printed and delivered to subscribers to the service. Former Chicago FBI agent Aaron Kohn, who investigated the wire service, told me, "One of the mob's major sources of income was their operation of the wire service systems and the layoff network for gambling on football. Among the clever devices they used for reaching out to the largest possible mass of consumers were football-betting parlay cards. By the 1950s, they were widespread. "The mob had to do everything they could to control the outcome of these games in order to control the level of their profits. You found them manipulating and corrupting in football, as they sometimes did in basketball. They would corrupt players and move into ownership control of teams whenever they could. Once the mob found the market for illegal gambling, corruption became an inseparable part of their operation." Within two years of creating Continental, McBride sold it to Ragen, with whom he had been involved in some real estate deals after the newspaper wars. Because Ragen needed McBride's contacts, he asked the Cleveland businessman to stay on and become his minority partner. McBride agreed and kept a one-third interest in the wire service-but he placed his investment in the name of his son Edward McBride who was away at college at the time of the purchase. The Chicago Mafia viewed Continental as potentially a multimillion-dollar business and a vehicle through which it could control sports bookmaking in the United States. In 1946, Chicago Mafia boss Tony Accardo, the Chicago mob's political fixer Jake "Greasy Thumb" Guzik, and syndicate member Murray "the Camel" Humphreys offered to buy Continental from Ragen. Despite the underworld's promise to keep Ragen as a partner, Ragen refused because he foresaw the obvious problem: Sooner or later, he would lose his independence. When the Chicago mobsters refused to relent, Ragen went to the FBI and signed a ninety-eight-page affidavit informing the bureau that Accardo, Guzik, and Humphreys were trying to take over his business. He also told the bureau that his own wire service had paid out over $600,000 to numerous unnamed politicians throughout the country for protection. The Chicago Mafia responded by setting up a rival wire service, Trans-American Press Service. Accardo-hired leg breakers attempted to muscle Continental's subscribers to cancel their contracts. When that ploy failed, Ragen, although supposedly under police protection, was ambushed and shot while driving in rush hour on a Chicago street on June 24, 1946. He died from his wounds seven weeks later. Indicted for the Ragen murder were David Yaras and Leonard Patrick. Yaras, a non-Italian /Sicilian member of the Chicago Mafia, was a henchman for Chicago Mafia chiefs Accardo and Sam Giancana. However, the two key witnesses against Yaras and Patrick were murdered; two others then refused to testify. Consequently, the case was dropped.[6] Yaras, who was among the first Chicago mobsters to "discover" Florida after Al Capone went to prison, was a key figure in the Continental Racing Wire and an ally of Mickey McBride. Soon after, McBride, again in his son's name, bought out Ragen's two-thirds interest from Ragen's son. Trans-American immediately folded, and its customers were given to Continental, clearly indicating Accardo's approval of McBride. Joe Nellis, the assistant counsel of the Kefauver Committee, told me that there was high drama when McBride was called to testify. "It took me two days to tear his ass apart," Nellis says. "The McBride situation was a very serious matter. Here was a guy who owned the Cleveland Browns, who was in bed with a lot of gamblers and hoodlums. And he was a man people respected. They took off their hats when he came around. "He tried to tell us that Continental Press was supplying racing wire information. That was simply not true. In the end, we undid Continental. It went out of business shortly after we exposed McBride as a supplier of illegal information to bookmakers all over the country about all sports." McBride was indeed the embodiment of the connection between organized crime and professional sports. In its final report, the Kefauver Committee charged that McBride was "making a gift to the Mafia-affiliated Capone mob in Chicago of about $4,000 a week." The committee also concluded that as a result of the national network created by McBride, "the Capone affiliates and the Mafia are now in control of the distribution of racing wire news with a resultant source of enormous profits and power over bookmaking." Another target of the Kefauver investigation was Chicago Cardinals owner Charles Bidwill, who had died in April 1947 of bronchial pneumonia in Chicago's St. George's Hospital.[7] Aside from his interest in the Cardinals, the fifty-one-year-old Bidwill was also president of the National jockey Club, which operated the Sportsmen's Park racetrack, and was the managing director of the Hawthorne racetrack, Both were located in Cicero, a Chicago suburb. Bidwill's partner at Sportsmen's Park was William H. Johnston, who was identified by the select committee as an operative in the Capone syndicate; Bidwill and Johnston had bought out Jack Keeshin, a founding member of the All-American Football Conference and the owner of the Chicago Rockets. The attorney for the two partners was Edward O'Hare, who had also represented Capone and was the business manager of the Cardinals team. O'Hare was murdered in 1939. Another investor at Sportsmen's Park was Frank Erickson. During testimony before the Kefauver Committee, racetrack operator John Patton—a Chicago Mafia associate and business partner of Frank Erickson-said that he, Bidwill, and Johnston had operated Sportsmen's Park together until Bidwill died. After his purchase of the Chicago Cardinals NFL franchise in 1933, Bidwill had also become the president of BentleyMurray Printing Company, which was one of Moses Annenberg's subsidiaries. The NFL owner and the mob-connected wireservice tycoon had been close friends for years. Still, Bidwill continued to do business with McBride and the wire-service operations after Annenberg was sent to prison. When I asked Nellis what danger is posed to professional sports when underworld associates like McBride and Bidwill were involved, he replied, "The shaving of points, the fixing of games, and any of the illegal activities that you can think of related to organized sports is made much easier by those people who know the characters and the tricks of organized crime." The Kefauver Committee also crippled another Bidwill business partner, bookmaker Frank Erickson, by exposing his gambling empire. In the wake of the hearings, Erickson was indicted and convicted for sixty counts of bookmaking and conspiracy. He was sentenced to two years at Riker's Island Penitentiary.[8] After another conviction for criminal tax fraud, Erickson moved from New York to Miami where he mentored a young gambler named Gilbert Lee Beckley who also maintained strong ties with the Mafia. Beckley would soon become the major figure in sports gambling in America. The Kefauver Committee's clear evidence of a concentrated national syndicate of crime that controlled the bulk of the nation's gambling operations forced Congress to pass two pieces of legislation. It banned wire-service operations while imposing a 10 percent excise tax on legal bets and forcing legal and illegal bookmakers to pay $50 a year for a gambling stamp, which was considered an "occupation tax." The new laws had the immediate effect of driving Continental and the wire services out of business. Although both pieces of legislation were important, the overall response by Congress was wimpish. The Kefauver Committee's request to legalize wiretapping and electronic surveillance by federal law-enforcement officials was rejected, as was a proposal to provide immunity to those within the underworld who were willing to testify against their more dangerous bosses. Congress's weak response to the work of the Kefauver Committee was among the reasons for the eventual institutionalization of organized crime in, among other groups, professional sports and America's political system.[9] Meantime, the NFL's new, Bell-inspired rules on corruption covered owners, players, coaches, and other team personnelbut did not include officials. Discussing who would be the ideal person on the field to fix, Harry Wismer said, "Too many situations arise over which the players or coach have no control ... The person I would go to would be an official ... They are underpaid and overcriticized. They are a perfect target for a player or a coach who is anxious to alibi on poor performance."'[10] At the beginning of the 1951 NFL season, Los Angeles mobster Jimmy Fratianno was $35,000 in debt and looking for a way out of his financial problems. "It just happened to be that this friend of mine called me [one] night and told me that they had this referee for the [Los Angeles] Rams, and to start betting on the Rams," Fratianno told my associate, William Scott Malone. "And so I started betting all over the country. And I bet between eighty thousand and ninety thousand dollars, I'm not sure." Fratianno added that he gave the information to friends in the Cleveland Mafia. The game Fratianno claimed was fixed was between the Rams and the now-extinct New York Yanks NFL football team on September 28, 1951.[11] The Rams won, 54-14. "Then, the next game we had was the San Francisco-Rams game [on October 28, 1951]," Fratianno continued. "And we had a loser there. We bet on the Rams and the Forty-niners won the game, [44-17]." Because the Rams played so poorly, the alleged fixed referee could not help them win their bets. "Everything they [the Rams] did went wrong," Fratianno told UPI reporter Gregory Gordon. However, Fratianno said that they bet only $15,000 on that game. Fratianno also said that there was a third game, the Rams versus the Green Bay Packers [on December 16, 195 1], which he and his partners bet on and won. The Rams won, 42-14. "We won two and lost one. But then ... the attorney general or somebody started investigating it. The bookmakers complained [about] all the money they lost, that there was something wrong. So [the referee] quit. That was the end of that with this referee." Describing the mechanics of the relationship with their referee, Fratianno said that he and his partners had laid down only $2,500 in bets for him on each game. In return, "He just called penalties, you know." Giving credence to Fratianno's story was the 1951 Rams star quarterback Bob Waterfield, who told Los Angeles reporter Bob Hunter that "at the end of the season, two officials were fired" by Bert Bell. Waterfield recalled seeing a referee arrive early for the Rams' workouts. After a period of time, the referee would talk to someone who would then make a telephone call. "I told [Rams owner] Dan Reeves about it," Waterfield said. "He reported it to the NFL office, which had the official tailed. It turns out the calls were made to Las Vegas. The official was fired." All the games named by Fratianno were officiated by the same game officials, a crew headed by Rawson Bowen. Lawrence Houston was the field judge for the Bowen crew in 1951. A longtime college referee from UCLA, Houston, who was born in 1906, was asked to become an NFL official in the late 1940s. When I found Houston and asked him about Fratianno's charges, he told me that he was part of the crew that officiated the three games cited by Fratianno. He added that he had known Waterfield since his days as a star quarterback with Van Nuys High School while Houston was coaching at the rival Eagle Rock High School. However, Houston denied knowing anything about fixed games or the dismissal of any official for gambling. "In all the time I was associated with the professional football program, no one ever approached me, suggested it, or talked about it," Houston says. "I never knew of any referees, owners, coaches, or players who gambled. The crew I worked with were very, very fine people. Nothing of that nature was ever discussed." Discussing his job as an official, Houston says, "We had to go out an hour before game time to inspect the field for markings and all of that. We would visit the dressing rooms and examine whether any player had any special protection. We had to examine whether there was a hard surface that might be injurious to someone else if they contacted it. After we got that, we went into our own dressing room, and we would chat about the mechanics of the game, just to be sure we were prepared and in the right frame of mind. We had a job to do. "There were observers up there watching us. I understand that the commissioner of officials would have someone up there, and he might even come out himself and watch us work. The crew never got together socially at any time. The only times we were together were on the days we worked games or if Hugh 'Shorty' Ray, who was in charge of officials for the NFL, would come out in the late summer or early fall for a day or two and have a meeting with us and go over things, like rules changes and things like that. We would actually be tested to make sure that we knew the right answers about any given situation that might arise during a game. Those were the only times we got together. "I never knew of anyone who had a vested interest in the outcome of a game." Houston remained with the NFL until 1953 when he was knocked to the ground and injured by a player after he had blown a play dead. "He hit me between my shoulders and knocked me about fifteen feet away from the ball. The crowd loved it, of course. But I could hardly shave or comb my hair for about three weeks. That ended my career." The world of sports expanded, seemingly unaffected by the revelations of the Kefauver Committee, which had been shoved off the front pages by the Red-baiting hearings of the U.S. House UnAmerican Activities Committee and Senator Joseph McCarthy's witch-hunt. To most people, Godless communism was a bigger threat to America's national security than the organized-crime syndicate was. With this public attitude to its advantage, the underworld fueled the fires of the Red scare and almost became perceived as acceptable citizens in the process. pps.68-75 --[notes]— CHAPTER 6 1. The Kefauver Committee began its investigation on May 26,1950, and held hearings in fifteen U.S. cities. 2. Reserve players for the Cleveland Browns, who were waiting to join the team roster, were offered jobs with McBride's cab company; thus the term taxi squad was born. 3. John Cooney, The Annenbergs: The Salvaging of a Tainted Dynasty (New York: Simon & Schuster, Inc., 1982), p. 21. 4. Also the owner of TV Guide and Seventeen, Walter Annenberg was appointed the ambassador to Great Britain in 1969 by President Richard Nixon and was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, along with Frank Sinatra, by President Ronald Reagan. In 1981, Reagan appointed Annenberg's wife, Leonore, as the White House chief of protocol. Mrs. Annenberg, the niece of movie mogul Harry Cohn, had been previously married to Beldon Katleman, the owner of El Rancho Vegas hotel/ casino in Las Vegas, and Lewis Rosenstiel, the head of Schenley Industries, the liquor distributors. Annenberg sold his publishing empire to Australian tycoon Rupert Murdoch in 1988. 5. Among those indicted was Chicago mob leader Frank Nitti, the heir to Al Capone. Nitti committed suicide on the day the indictments were handed up. He was replaced as the head of the Chicago Capone underworld by Anthony Accardo. For more information about the Hollywood extortion scheme, see my book Dark Victory: Ronald Reagan, MCA and the Mob (New York: Viking Press, 1986). 6. The police captain who headed the investigation of the Ragen murder was found slain in his garage, with his jaw torn off by a .45 caliber bullet. 7. After Bidwill's death, the Chicago Cardinals were inherited by his widow and their two sons, William V. and Charles Jr., also known as Stormy. Mrs. Bidwill, who had married St. Louis businessman Walter Wolfner in 1949, died in 1962. The two sons then took over the team. William bought out Stormy in 1972 after a turbulent partnership. Charles Bidwill's brother Arthur J. Bidwill was an Illinois state senator at the time of Charles's death. 8. Erickson's partner, Frank Costello, also fell on hard times. During his fifth appearance before the Kefauver Committee, he angrily walked out of the hearing. Cited for contempt of Congress, Costello was found guilty in 1952 and sentenced to eighteen months in prison. The following year, Costello was indicted again-this time for tax evasion. He was found guilty on three counts and sentenced to another five years in prison. While fighting his convictions, Costello retained a young Washington attorney Edward Bennett Williams, who soon after became a part owner and presi dent of the Washington Redskins. In 1955, while the federal government was attempting to deport Costello, Williams successfully engineered the dismissal of the deportation case because of illegal wiretaps used by the government. However, Williams was unable to overturn Costello's income-tax conviction, and in 1958, Costello was sent back to prison. A year earlier, in May 1957, an assassin Vincent Gigante tried to kill Costello—but his bullet only grazed the mobster's head. Costello got the message and retired as the head of his crime family. He was replaced by Vito Genovese. 9. During the late 1940s and early 1950s, the sports world had been rocked by point-shaving and game-fixing scandals in college basketball. Seven schools and thirty-two players were involved, including Manhattan College, Kentucky, City College of New York (which won the national championship in 1950), Bradley, New York University, and Long Island University. "All of these fixes were set up in the Catskill Mountains," Ralph Salerno told me. "The way it worked was that if you were a good basketball player, someone would come to you and say they could get you a cushy job at some Catskill resort-and just play basketball for the summer. And the hotels formed a basketball league-the Catskill Mountain League. People who vacationed up there would see some top basketball by players like Bob Cousy of Holy Cross. And there were a lot of New York bookmakers who went there for their vacations. Even though it was just a small summer league, the bookmakers would wine them and dine them [the players] and throw them a few bucks when they shaved points. What difference did it make to the kid? These games didn't count. "But that's when they conditioned the kids. There were only seven colleges implicated-but there were many more involved. Frank Hogan, the D.A. in New York County, was a gentleman. Way back then, Bob Cousy was among those brought in for interrogation. But Hogan's policy was 'While we're still investigating, bring these college kids in late at night after the New York press has gone home. I don't want to see the name of a single college player in the paper until he's indicted. Then he gets his name in the paper.'" One of those players implicated in the point-shaving scheme, Dale Bonstable of the University of Kentucky, said that, at first, he couldn't tell the gamblers from the average fan. "Those guys were smooth talkers. They should have been salesmen. They took us out for a stroll, treated us to a meal, and before we knew anything we were right in the middle of it. They said that we didn't have to dump a game." Earlier, in 1948, two players in the National Hockey League-Don Galinger of the Boston Bruins and Billy Taylor of the Detroit Red Wings-were suspended for life because they had placed bets with a Detroit bookmaker. Galinger confessed that he had placed his money against his own team. In the midst of these sports scandals, the Harry Gross police corruption case in New York also erupted. A top bookmaker in the Erickson sphere of influence, Brooklyn-based Gross had been paying off police officers in return for protection. After being arrested for gambling and imprisoned for a year, Gross turned state's evidence against his silent partners. Twenty-three officers, including five captains, were convicted and dismissed from the department. The fact that law-enforcement officials were accepting money to protect bookmaking operations was proven to be widespread. The Gross case served as the impetus to expand the college basketball point-fixing investigation. 10. Harry Wismer, The Public Calls It Sport (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1965), pp. 54-55. 11. In 1950, the Los Angeles Rams became the first professional football team to sell its exclusive television rights and have all its games broadcast. The following year, in order to increase home attendance, the Rams permitted only the televising of road games --[cont]-- Aloha, He'Ping, Om, Shalom, Salaam. Em Hotep, Peace Be, Omnia Bona Bonis, All My Relations. Adieu, Adios, Aloha. Amen. Roads End DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion and informational exchange list. Proselyzting propagandic screeds are not allowed. Substance—not soapboxing! These are sordid matters and 'conspiracy theory', with its many half-truths, misdirections and outright frauds is used politically by different groups with major and minor effects spread throughout the spectrum of time and thought. That being said, CTRL gives no endorsement to the validity of posts, and always suggests to readers; be wary of what you read. CTRL gives no credeence to Holocaust denial and nazi's need not apply. Let us please be civil and as always, Caveat Lector. ======================================================================== Archives Available at: http://home.ease.lsoft.com/archives/CTRL.html http:[EMAIL PROTECTED]/ ======================================================================== To subscribe to Conspiracy Theory Research List[CTRL] send email: SUBSCRIBE CTRL [to:] [EMAIL PROTECTED] To UNsubscribe to Conspiracy Theory Research List[CTRL] send email: SIGNOFF CTRL [to:] [EMAIL PROTECTED] Om
